Duplicate Tichu

At the Gathering of Friends 2007, I ran a duplicate Tichu
tournament. It seemed to go pretty well, so here is mostly
enough information for someone else to do it.

Boards

Tichu cards are about 1/4" wider than bridge cards, so normal
duplicate boards won't fit them. If you are willing to play
with Tichu decks made by marking up jokers, then you can use
normal boards. If you don't have them, they are available at
Baron-Barclay
bridge supplies. If you buy boards, get a
carrying case
for them as well.

I chose, instead, to make my own. I built them out of card
stock and staples. Here's a
template. Print this onto card
stock. Stack one such template with another piece of stock
and cut them down the center line. Staple along the lines drawn
and near the edges on each side at each end. Number each board.
You'll need between 16 and 24 boards. They seem a bit fragile;
I made two extras just in case, but none broke. The results look
like this.

Silent Tichu Calls

Since other players will be near you and will play the same
hands, we need to call Tichu silently. To achieve this, give
each player a small card
with "Tichu" on one side. To call
Tichu, the player simply turns the card up to the printed side.
This card will have another use as we shall see.

Private Score

Each player will want a private score
to record his score and
such. In particular, players must record their exact passes
(suit included). I think it'd be helpful also to record one's
received passes, but I didn't leave room for that. Next time
I'll also make the private score larger. The one I have now
is in PostScript. I put in on a half page of paper so that
the fold will prevent see-through.

Playing the hands

At the beginning of each hand, the players ought to count
their cards. Since passes are going to be reversed, fouled
boards are likely. If a player doesn't have 14 cards, he
can call the director and get the hand fixed.

We didn't use Grand Tichu. I think this is a good idea; the
winners of a duplicate will typically be those who were lucky
enough to encounter folks who thought they were desperate and
had to call Grand Tichu in the late rounds to have a chance
to win. Of course, most of these will fail, and those who
get the benefit of this will probably end up winning.

If one really wants to include Grand Tichu, one can print
out the first eight cards in each hand and include that on
a paper slip in the board pocket with the cards. I chose
not to do that.

The pass is laid out normally. Players write down the pass
on their hand records before the pass is completed. At the
end of the hand, they retrieve the cards so passed. This
got confused a few times, usually because a player either
didn't write down his pass, or wrote the wrong cards. To
fix this, I printed large hand records and came by to help
un-mess up the hands. I think an improvement is to attach
these records to the boards with a rubber band, so that the
players can do this themselves.

In order to play the hands out without mucking the cards,
players play cards to tricks face up in front of them
instead of into the middle of the table. When a trick is
won, they place the cards face down on one of the four
sides of their "Tichu" card, corresponding to who won
the trick. At scoring time, each player combines his piles
into their score and the opponenents' score and announces
who gets how many points. This takes surprisingly little
time and goes very smoothly.

After the pass has been restored, each player puts his
hand back in the appropriate slot in the board.

Scoring the Hands

I had the players write the results on standard bridge
pick-up slips
and came by at the end of each round to retrieve them.
In the final round, each board was scored on an individual slip;
prior to that, a full round was on one slip.

Scoring the Game

I assigned to each pair the difference between their score
and their opponents' on each board. This provides incentive
to beat Tichu calls.

Once all the results on a board
were available, I subtracted the median score obtained on
the board among all the players who sat in the same direction.
A standard ACBL recap
sheet worked well for doing this calculation; a 4-1/2 table
game was scored within two or three minutes of the last boards'
being finished. A computer program would make this faster.
It's not clear to me that the median is the right statistic;
it is likely that it doesn't fully remove the benefit of getting
good hands. It clearly does, however, to some degree.

Scoring was total points; matchpoints would, I think, put too
much emphasis on taking 5s, 10s, and kings in the play.

Movements

Movements for duplicate bridge have been worked out for pretty
much any number of pairs; these can be used for Tichu.
Guide cards for those movements are
available either for free on
my web site, or printed on good
quality stock at
Baron-Barclay.
I'd get envelopes for them if you are going to do this a lot. If you
use the ones I supply, cheap sheet protectors are handy to protect
them.

Each board appears to take about 10 minutes. So a 20-board game
will take about three and a half to four hours. Don't panic that
the first few rounds will take longer than expected; the players
need some time to learn the procedure. The movements I chose
for various size games are

Tables

Movement

Rounds

Boardsper Round

Boardsin Play

BoardsPlayed

2

Howell

3

7

21

21

3

Howell

5

4

20

20

4

Howell

7

3

21

21

5

Howell

9

2

18

18

6

Howell

11

2

22

22

7

Mitchell

7

3

21

21

8

Skip Mitchell

7

3

24

21

9

Mitchell

9

2

18

18

10

Skip Mitchell

9

2

20

18

11

Mitchell

11

2

22

22

12

Skip Mitchell

11

2

24

22

Table cards for Mitchell and Skip Mitchell movements are just
paper with the table number on them and a compass.

If you are not familiar with movements,
Duplicate
Bridge Direction by Alex Groner is a good resource. But the
movements above are pretty simple. "Boards in Play" means the
total number of boards you'll need available; "Boards Played" means
the number of boards each pair will playthat'll determine the
length of the game.

A Howell movement pretty much requires the table
cards referenced above. The table cards tell each pair where to
go for the next round. The director should move the boards; the
pattern is pretty simple, and the table cards list the boards
which should be there. In a Howell movement, all pairs play
all other pairs.

In a Mitchell movement, pairs start either East/West
or North/South and stay that direction for the rest of the
session. After each round, E/W pairs move up one table, and
boards move down one table. In a Mitchell movement, each pair
plays roughly half of the others. Players can move the boards
in a Mitchell.

A Skip Mitchell is the same, except that players (not boards!)
skip one table halfway through the game. So in an 8-table Skip
Mitchell, E/W will skip after round 4.

Hand Records

Duplicate can be played without hand records, but it's
fun to have them, and in Tichu, they are pretty helpful
to restore passes which went awry. If you don't use them,
just have the players shuffle and deal for the first round,
then let the boards maintain the hands thereafter. It might
be helpful to have the players write down the hands after
they make them.

In order to play with hand records, the director must
generate a set in advance and make the boards. If you
are going to be the person who makes them boards, have
someone (or a group) sort all the decks beforehand so
that you only have to set the hands. With some practice,
setting the hands can be done in 15-20 minutes.

Alternatively, if one plays a Mitchell movement, one can
have the players make the boards the first round. The
director places the hand records for just the boards on
the table, the players make the boards, the director
collects the hand records, and the players skip the first
round.

I wrote a set of C programs to create hand records
for Tichu. One produces the hands in one long column, so
to print them for the players, I have another to format
them into easily printed-pages. 24 hands fit easily on
two sides of one page. Another prints them into big
postscript files so that they are easily made by the
director. See the above link for more details.

In case anyone is interested, here's the set of hands
used at the Gathering 2007: